Where did the tail go?

Not alone was the comet tail visible with binoculars last night but the comet was visible with the naked eye, the reason we dont see the tail very well is probably because of the direction that the comet is heading, I could not detect any sign of green in this comet

There are many images on the net with the tail showing clearly so it's not over yet...

Yep but for a period around the 8/9th of January it appeared to disappear on images from people who have been taking nearly daily photos. Since it returned a day or so later there were suggestions that the solar activity may have influenced it.

Pete Lawrence started a discussion on usenet about it.

Cheers,
~Al

Actually heres another image showing an apparent disruption in the ion tail

www.spaceweather.com/swpod2005/10jan05/Seip.jpg

Thats the best image I've seen so far of the comet.

I saw a tail (pointing in the right direction this time) last night. The clouds cleared but the storm force gusts of wind didn't so all my photographs were spoilt. The blurring did have the effect of emphasizing the tail, which was an ion trail stretching from the coma to zeta Persei, which is quite some distance. Perihelion is just a week or so away.

I suspected a short dust tail last Monday night -- the coma of the comet in the 20x60mm binos showed a lot of structure with a number of streams of material. One thing I was wondering about the prominence of the ion tail seen in some reports on the 'Net is whether they were influenced by photographs. The reason I say this is that there were a few knots of faint stars strung along a line between the comet's head and the Pleiades last Monday night and in smaller binoculars it might have been easy for the eye to tease out an an apparent "tail" -- the 20x60mms just about resolved them.

atb,

John